Mural #42
Adam’s Elementary School
Santa Barbera, CA
Flowers #1,195 - #1,282 of 10,000
Completed October 2021
Chapter 3… my time at Adam’s.
After leaving Santa Cruz, I hightailed it down to LAX to pick up my sister, Missy. She had flown in from Pa to hang out for the week and see some sights. We stopped at In-N-Out before driving back up to Adam’s Elementary to meet Sara, the art Teacher, and see where we’ll be painting. After looking at the space, we started laying out the sheets of plywood that would be transformed into the flower mural.
We spent three days sketching out the design and cutting all of the panels down to size. After that, we took the weekend off to walk around Santa Monica and explore some local hiking trails around Santa Barbra. It was so nice having someone else to share my adventures with for the week but Missy had to get back to her life in Pa. We drove back to LA and she was gone.
This was one of the largest community workshop we had ever done! Five full days of students painting. Each class had about 30 minutes of painting with a 10-minute break in between. It was a fantastic week! Every morning, Sara and I would haul the panels from the cafeteria down to the soccer fields on the school ground for the kids to paint and then haul them back inside at the end of the day.
On the last day of painting the sky turned a bright orange from a wild fire nearby. It was really interesting. You could smell the smoke in the air.
Once all the students and teachers had a chance to paint, we resembled them in the cafeteria where I spent almost two weeks cleaning up the design and outlining everything. Usually, I don’t get to see the paneled murals get attached to the wall as it takes months to set up an installation with the maintenance team but this was a very fast turnaround. They installed it the last week I was there and it turned out amazing!
By the time everything was finished I had spent just under a month with Adam’s Elementary School and it was beginning to feel like home. But like most things the show must go on and I buckled up for the long drive to the center of Texas.
